Archive for the ‘art’ Category

[Editor’s note: Fascinating look at the cultural geography of the United States sorted by large cities and subtracted from the 50 states. For instance, considered as metros, New York city, Los Angeles, and Chicago are larger in population than the non-metropolitan portions of Texas, California, North Carolina, Florida, and Pa. The author has another good post on subway systems around the world all scaled to the same size. Thanks Jo!]

Republished from fake is the new real.By Neil Freeman, artist and urban planner.

The fifty largest metro areas (in blue), disaggregated from their states (in orange). Each has been scaled and sorted according to population. The metro areas are US-Census defined CBSAs and MSAs.

[Editor's note: Todd's flow map of TARP spending. It's a charting beautify. I'm catching up on a couple week's of posts while Natural Earth was in its final stretch.]

Republished from The Washington Post. Saturday 28 Nov., 2009.

The Troubled Assets Relief Program, or TARP, was designed to stabilize the financial system as well as aid homeowners and small businesses in the wake of the credit crisis. The Treasury Department has until the end of the year to renew the controversial program. Of the $700 billion that was authorized, $560.7 billion was planned for various programs. About $71 billion has been returned from financial firms and about another $10 billion has been paid in interest and dividends.

They’re as Montreal as smoked meat, street hockey and the two-cheek kiss. They sprout like mushrooms in the spring thaw. They wreck car suspensions, wreak havoc on cyclists and give our city a Third World veneer: potholes.

Spring had just sprung this year when Davide Luciano and Claudia Ficca were cruising through Outremont in their 1997 Jetta and they hit a big one, “really hard.” “Six hundred dollars later, we came up with the idea of using potholes in a positive light,” explained Toronto-born filmmaker Luciano, 31.

“We started thinking, ‘What’s useful about these craters, what good can we bring to our city?’ ” said Ficca, 27, a recent Concordia University graduate in Italian language and literature. As both are photographers, they began imagining scenarios for a series that might be called Theme and Variations on the Pothole. They recruited family and friends, and got started.

“They were game enough to put themselves out there, in the middle of the street, dress up like fools – and be laughed at by drivers,” Ficca said of their subjects. They started shooting a few weeks after replacing the rear suspension on the Jetta. The photo sessions were mainly done during the evening rush hour, when subjects and natural light were available.

Drivers stopped in amazement and passersby laughed, the couple said. Most understood that this was about having fun with our urban curse. “We rented or borrowed props, called our friends, and took it from there,” Luciano remarked. It was a team effort for the couple, who took turns shooting with a Nikon D 80.

The first shot was of clothes being washed in a pothole. The next was a diver set to plunge. Then came a scuba diver, with flippers, ready for “the deep.”

A gardener was shot planting flowers in potholes. And Luciano posed as a “wine maker” squashing grapes barefoot in a nice hole.

Each photo is named for the street on which it was shot, and the series will be on exhibit Wednesday night.

These charts show movie character interactions. The horizontal axis is time. The vertical groupings of the lines indicates which characters are together at a given time. On the LoTRs up and down roughly correspond to northwest and southeast.

California, you may have heard, is an apocalyptic mess of raging wildfires, soaring unemployment, mass foreclosures and political paralysis. It’s dysfunctional. It’s ungovernable. Its bond rating is barely above junk. It’s so broke, it had to hand out IOUs while its leaders debated how many prisoners to release and parks to close. Nevada aired ads mocking California’s business climate to lure its entrepreneurs. The media portray California as a noir fantasyland of overcrowded schools, perpetual droughts, celebrity breakdowns, illegal immigration, hellish congestion and general malaise, captured in headlines like “Meltdown on the Ocean” and “California’s Wipeout Economy” and “Will California Become America’s First Failed State?”

Actually, it won’t.

Ignore the California whinery. It’s still a dream state. In fact, the pioneering megastate that gave us microchips, freeways, blue jeans, tax revolts, extreme sports, energy efficiency, health clubs, Google searches, Craigslist, iPhones and the Hollywood vision of success is still the cutting edge of the American future — economically, environmentally, demographically, culturally and maybe politically. It’s the greenest and most diverse state, the most globalized in general and most Asia-oriented in particular at a time when the world is heading in all those directions. It’s also an unparalleled engine of innovation, the mecca of high tech, biotech and now clean tech. In 2008, California’s wipeout economy attracted more venture capital than the rest of the nation combined. Somehow its supposedly hostile business climate has nurtured Google, Apple, Hewlett-Packard, Facebook, Twitter, Disney, Cisco, Intel, eBay, YouTube, MySpace, the Gap and countless other companies that drive the way we live.

[Editor’s note: I picked up this fascinating read while in San Francisco earlier this month and devoured the artwork and critical essays by Gayle Clemans on the flight back to DC. Features pieces by Maya Lin and Paula Scher previously mentioned here. Thanks Jag!]

What tattoo art has to do with fashion, vintage atlases and Nazi concentration camps.

We’ve always been fascinated by maps — through various elements of design, from typography to color theory to data visualization, they brilliantly condense and capture complex notions about space, scale, topography, politics and more. But where things get most interesting is that elusive intersection of the traditional and the experimental, where artists explore the map medium as a conceptual tool of abstract representation. And that’s exactly what The Map of the Art, a fantastic Morning News piece by Katharine Harmon, examines.

Corriette Schoenaerts, ‘Europe,’ 2005

Schoenaerts, a conceptual photographer living in Amsterdam, constructs countries and continents out of clothing.

Qin Ga, ‘Site 22: Mao Zedong Temple,’ 2005

In 2002, China’s Long March Project embarked upon a ‘Walking Visual Display’ along the route of the 1934-1936 historic 6000-mile Long March, and Beijing-based artist Qin kept tracked the group’s route in a tattooed map on his back. Three years later, Qin continued the trek where the original marchers had left off, accompanied by a camera crew and a tattoo artist, who continually updated the map on Qin’s back.

[Editor’s note: Jason Kottke’s birthday present to his nephew is a subway-style kid’s mental map of New York city. Thanks Melissa!]

Republished from Kottke.org.

This was my present to my nephew for his 3rd birthday. He loves, loves, loves the subway so my sister asked me if I could make a custom map with all the places that mean something to him on the poster.

Infographics refers to visual representations of information, data or knowledge. These graphics are used where complex information needs to be explained quickly and clearly, such as in signs, maps, journalism, technical writing, and education. They are also used extensively as tools by computer scientists, mathematicians, and statisticians to ease the process of developing and communicating conceptual information.

Infographics allows you to see the and understand the concept in a more interesting and useful manner, Here I’ve listed 27+ beautiful infographic design, that will help and inspire you to design a complex data in to a simple attractive design.

[Editor's note: This membership solicitation from the Nature Conservancy creates an Americas globe out of the negative space in a field of "it's not my problem, yet" text. Looks like a magazine ad, not sure where I scanned it from last month.]